Candidates for Seacoast's State Senate Square off

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Andrew Smith, director of the University of New Hampshire survey center, says the District 23 race, centered in Exeter, is a test of SB110's popularity.

SB 110 is the controversial Senate bill designed to increase competition and decrease health insurance costs.

Instead, many state residents have seen their health insurance premiums skyrocket since the bill's passage.

The reason SB110 is so important to the District 23 race is that incumbent Republican Russell Prescott supported it.

And as Andy Smith points out, Prescott only narrowly defeated his challenger, Democrat Maggie Wood Hassan two years ago.

(Smith) :17

“Senator Prescott is probably best known by those people who follow state politics closely for Senate Bill 110, which changed the way health insurance can be sold to businesses, particularly small businesses in the state, and that is certainly I think something a lot of small business people are concerned about.”

District 23 covers an area that ranges from Newmarket to Kingston to Seabrook.

And Prescott is seeking his second term.

While he stands by his sponsorship of the health insurance legislation, Prescott concedes that some residents have fallen through the cracks.

(Prescott) :24

“What has happened, is that there is a few percentage, less than ten per cent of the market with those small groups, with a serious health condition, they have been very hard hit. We have a study going on, its not really a study, because we’re finding out what we need to do to make new changes to the law to come out right here in January to address those situations.”

Prescott owns his own manufacturing and plumbing supply company in Exeter.

And he proudly points out that he still pays all the insurance premiums for his 29 employees.

Prescott argues that repealing SB 110 will actually cause harm because, he predicts, insurers will leave the state. ,

But Prescott’s opponent Maggie Wood Hassan, does want to repeal the law.

She believes SB 110 has allowed insurance companies to “cherry pick” its customers.

(Hassan)

“Those are people who are employees of small businesses which has now been defined as businesses with one to 50 employees. And so we’d had small businesses have their rates go up as much as 240 per cent on the Seacoast, businesses dropping their health care, and people going without health insurance which is driving the rates up for all the rest of us.”

Hassan, an Exeter attorney, wants to enact measures that can increase the state’s risk pool of those who need health insurance and therefore spread out the risk.

In District 24, meanwhile, the focus is not on health insurance, but on education funding.

That race is for an open seat held for the past 12 years by Democrat Burt Cohen.

Cohen left it for a highly publicized, attempted campaign against US Senator Judd Gregg.

In this race, Republican John Lyons, an attorney in Portsmouth, faces Democrat Martha-Fuller Clark.

Clark gave up her State House seat two years ago to run unsuccessfully for Congress against First District Congressman Jeb Bradley.

UNH pollster Andrew Smith calls this race interesting because of Lyons' aggressive campaign.

(Smith) :08

“My sense going into this election was that it was going to be a Democratic hold, but it looks like its going to be quite close, down to the wire.”

Lyons is well known in Portsmouth as a School Board member.

He also sits on the State Board of Education.

From Newington to Hampton, District 24 is largely comprised of so-called property rich towns.

All are donor towns under the statewide property tax and are members of the so-called Coalition Communities opposed to the tax.

Lyons says that the answer to the statewide property tax is targeted state aid to the communities that need it.

(Lyons) :22

“There’s a clear solution to this and it’s the coalition plan, which passed the House as Senate bill 711, which called for targeted aid. That aid would be paid for out of the educational trust fund, in which there is sufficient money in the budget, paid for partly by the real estate transfer tax, the lottery, etc.”

And Lyons believes the education funding crisis can be solved without any new broadbased taxes.

His democratic opponent, 12 year veteran lawmaker Martha Fuller-Clark, says that her first priority is eliminating donor communities.

(Fuller-Clark) :26

“The quickest fix for that is to go ahead with the tobacco tax of 15 cents per packet that was opposed by the current Governor and his administration. It would raise approximately $70 million dollars, We could at least retire the obligation of the donor communities through that tax and then look at where would be the next best place to allocate those additional dollars.”

Fuller-Clark has not said that repealing the statewide property tax will be her priority.

And that technicality pushed The Portsmouth Herald newspaper to endorse Lyons who has made such a promise.

In making that endorsement, the paper's editorial staff wrote that “The first priority of any senator representing Seacoast towns should be to cure the disease,” by doing away with the tax.

For NHPR News, this is Roger Wood.

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